A Useful Exercise for Junior Scholars on the Academic Job Market

Here is a story and useful exercise for people on the job market for junior faculty positions or postdocs: When I was a postdoc at Georgia Tech, I was asked to go through about 20 postdoc applications for my thoughts on them. This was for the Center for Nonlinear Science in the physics department. (They had already removed about half of the original set of applications, so these were ones that made the cut to still be considered.) I decided that I would try to do it in one hour. It actually took me about two, even while purposely trying to be very fast. Then, in addition to helping the Georgia Tech folks (which was a good thing to do), I asked myself what I noticed about the applications during that intentionally rushed time. I then used those insights to help me improve my application materials.

There are various ways to do such an exercise, and I suspect most people will be doing it without looking at submitted applications in the above way. Gather a set of postdocs in a sufficiently broad field (e.g., "applied mathematics" or even just "mathematics"), as it's a good part of the exercise to see how you evaluate people who are studying topics that are somewhat outside of your expertise. Make sure there is a strict time limit, as you want to see what you notice — both good and bad — about applications in that setting, as it's a realistic setting for how applications are evaluated when it counts. I think you'll pick up some good insights this way, and you can also give each other helpful advice to improve your application materials.

There are various things that we (= senior academics) talk about and give as advice all of the time, but it's good to really try it for yourself. Then you'll see what you notice — both good and bad — in the bundle of applications that you read really quickly.

And, importantly, good luck on your job hunts!

Incidentally, you can find my research statement, teaching statement, and LaTeX file (with drafts of various 'personalization' paragraphs) from my time on the job market, to get my first faculty position, over a decade ago on this Web page

How Many First-Authored Papers in "Leading" Journals Does One Need to be Hired as an Assistant Professor?

This is in ecology, but we can think of analogous exercises for mathematics and physics (including also with numbers of citations of papers at the time of being hired).

How many first-authored papers in “leading” journals does an ecologist need to be hired as a tenure-track asst. prof at an R1 university? Not nearly as many as most ecologists think. https://t.co/qpfozljVD0 pic.twitter.com/VrcfEbTjdh

— Dynamic Ecology (@DynamicEcology) October 2, 2018

FYI: I have seen several things on this blog over the years that are relevant far beyond their core ecology audience, so it's worth a look beyond this post.

Update: It's also not required to have lots of citations to get a top faculty job. It would be good to see a distribution of what people have had in practice. (The number of citations listed by Google Scholar for me for 2006 is 53.)

Grilling a Lawmaker About his Degrees

Once again, truth is stranger than fiction. Check out this story.

After proposing party affiliation quotas for faculty, lawmaker grilled about business degree from Sizzler Steakhouse https://t.co/9ycYTISAm1

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 3, 2017

In his tweet, Carl Bergstrom links to a Boing Boing article, but the article to which it links gives a clearer explanation.

It's not quite as surreal as a National Park Service Twitter account going rogue (initially by simply tweeting basic facts about climate science), but it's still odd.

A Useful Blog Entry About Interviewing for Faculty Jobs

This blog entry is a useful resource for people interviewing for faculty jobs (or who have members or alums from their groups interviewing for such jobs).

It is written within a specific context, but it includes points that apply much more generally.

Some of the links therein also look potentially useful.

(Tip of the cap to Meghan Duffy.)

Time Pie Chart: Postdoc Versus Faculty

Here is a handy pie chart to illustrate what we mean when faculty say that in these respects (we of course are very much aware that there are certain sources of stress that can counteract idealized feelings), postdoc time is the ideal time in an academic's life. That said, being a professor is a great job!

Postdoc vs Assistant Prof. I keep hoping to return to "postdoc mode" of research but this gif has me worried. pic.twitter.com/7HdqyqFMht

— Suchi Saria (@suchisaria) August 6, 2016

(Tip of the cap to Gabor Vattay, who retweeted the above tweet from one of today's speakers in the MBI workshop I'm attending.)

Congratulations to Vivien Chua!

Vivien Chua, one of my former undergraduate students from my Georgia Tech days, just got a faculty job offer in Civil and Environmental Engineering from National University of Singapore. (She's from Singapore, so she gets to go back home.) Congratulations!

Also, this makes me feel old.

Old Job Application Materials

I keep passing along my old job application materials (from Fall 2006, my last time on the job market) to various people, so I have decided to repost these items. You can find 2006-era teaching and research statements on this page, which also contains two LaTeX introductions.

Feel free to pass these materials along to anybody who might benefit (even if you want to use them as examples of what to do wrong).

I won't post any materials from when I applied for postdoc positions during the Fall 2001 season because, frankly, my research and teaching statements from that era sucked.

I am happy to pass along old cover letters as well, but I won't be posting those publicly.

(And, obviously, these materials are most relevant to mathematicians, physicists, and the like. I think, however, that they are not entirely irrelevant to others.)